~ Headshot, Portrait, and Editorial Photographer

Shooting on a Sunny Day

I did a quick photowalk today around the corner from my house. I really wanted to explore some off-camera flash in broad daylight and using the warming gels supplied by Nikon for my SB800.

Here is a classic Milford shot at Merwin’s Point on a sunny day. The key to the blue sky being blue is to expose in Manual Mode only for the sky, then drop your camera, recompose the shot, then, ignoring the in-camera meter telling you that it is over or underexposed, take the shot. This is a direct raw to jpeg conversion, no processing at all.

Then I became intrigued with the texture of the snow and ice, so I went down along the water’s edge and found some ice to shoot. The natural ice and light from above was totally boring.

So I underexposed the shot by about 1 stop, setting my shutter to 1/250 for my Pocket Wizards and flash synch and using aperture to really close down the light. I set my SB800 to the right of the frame, put on the warming gel, zoomed the flash head to 105 mm for a tight spread of light, and set my WB to Tungsten. Take a look at the difference.

Then I moved the flash to the left and set a different composition but used the same settings.

Here’s my setup. This just goes to show that with off camera flash you can shoot all day every day as long as the batteries hold out!

That’s my flash on the left.

I’ve been spending the last few days putting together my two upcoming meetups and wedding workshop. This year promises to be the best yet!